Why is my brain 570yrs behind

[BrianGar]

So its happened again.

This is becoming more common and has be worried about how up to speed my brain is with today's world and technology.

At the end of last yr as a Christmas gift, I designed and made a press for pressing apples. Its was of all wood construction bar fixings.

I was then faced with the problem of cutting the 3'' dia thread and nut in wood.

Cutting the thread was easy, one woodwork lathe and a home-made spiral cutting jig c/w router made that pretty basic. The router is fixed to a carriage over the blank, a cable attaches to carriage, and wraps around lathe spindle. As you wind the spindle, it draws carriage along...you get the idea.

When it came to cutting the internal thread I got a feeling of panic. How the hell would I do it. Turn a 3'' tap some way in steel? Er no thanks!
I thought of casting, using the screw as the pattern, that way I could cast a nut from it. I had then thought, to avoid having to recut the internal thread again in the cast alloy due to shrink, that Ide simply turn the wooden screw a little smaller to provide clearance fit.
This Idea seemed ok, but, the cast sand finish on alloy, would, I thought create wear problems on the wooden screw. And also, alloy In a totally wood construction would I felt, look a little industrial.

I left it at that for the day and went to bed with my head spinning, as you do when a problem has to be solved.
The next day I was putting up some pictures for a friend, when I came across my Archimedes drill. Yes, I do use one sometimes I will admit, its a fine little tool. Anyway, I noticed when I lifted it by its nut, the centre spindle would drop, and spin at the same time.
Bingo I thought, If I could in some way replicate this nut onto my wooden screw, then if I turned the screw the end would follow the form of the thread perfectly. It had to.

I set about making a box that in someway, I could build something into to catch on the threads.
I cut a load of 'v' mouldings for want of a better word, and glued them inside the box on each side. I used the wooden screw to place them while the glue dried.

So there I had it, a box capable of following the thread form, and translating the movement to a cutter, which I mounted on the end.
I bored a pilot in the 'nut' beam, the size of the min diameter of screw, and after about 4 hrs of re-setting the cutter, I had a prefect internally cut thread.

I was over the moon with my new discovery, self thought, no books or internet involved!


I completed the job and all were impressed.

A while later I thought Id look up presses and guess whos name came up?

Johannes Gutenberg.......... He had discovered this method 570yrs ago. I was sickened.
I was even more sickened when I saw a video of Steven Fry doing a documentary on it, and the way they used pegs instead of my 'v' mouldings inside the box.
I was even more shocked when another search returned me to this very section, where I have just become aware of because of it.

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=238179&page=2

That was that issue, now onto another issue(this one is shorter, I promise)

Train differentials...........they dont need to exist.....why is that I wonder.....its a solid axle 5ft wide....how the hell does it do curved tracks...

Immediately on thinking of the question, I removed myself from the computer, and all old books on steam trains/rail.

I like to torment myself so I set about figuring out how it worked.
I think it was 5 days later that it finally hit me that the damn wheels were tapered, or conical if you like. Therefore altering there diameters as the train made a turn, and slewed abit to one side on the rails. The damn flanges have nothing to do with cornering at all!

Soon after, I looked up all about train wheels, the answer was told as if you were telling a 5yr old how to eat and ice-cream. Looking back at it now It is very simple, and if you tell someone it they say to you ''ya, that makes sense, trains dont have differentials you know'' '' How else do you think it worked''.
I often wonder did these type of people ever actually think about it at all, or just read it somewhere and realised it made sense, and told others.
I went on to find that Richard Feynman talked about train wheels too, more wondered than talked, but raised the issue as to wondering how exactly they work, and solving it.

Getting back to my point, this idea was also figured out many many decades ago, but yet I got a surprise when I reached the answer solo.

So what is it all about? Is my brain stuck in the dark ages?
Or as Richard Feynman put it, does the pleasure lie in finding things out?

It can be disconcerting at times knowing that it takes my brain 5days to figure out something they solved light years ago when currently trying to solve an issue with a dry sump design!

Or, should I look at it as a good thing that we share common traits with the original ''finder-outers'' albeit some_time later!

Do people have to figure out simple stuff anymore? Google may have some spoilt, the simple answers are all there. But Google does not tell us how complex it may have been to get to that simple answer.

I know some of you are laughing now reading the whole deal on train axles....but how did you find out?!

I think finding out for yourself is important, more-so than being told the answer, who knows what else you may think of along the way.

BG

 

[swertel]

Now if only new grads and the "younger generation" understood this concept. Put down the iPods, game systems, and social networks. Sit back, quietly, and see what your brain can do.

--Scott

http://wertel.eng.pro

 

[BrianGar]

Swertel, I better not tell you my age yet if thats the case!

 

[IRstuff]

I don't see that there's a problem, it's a case of "better late than never."

I think that if you're able to invent yourself out of these dilemmas, you have nothing to be concerned about. Just consider what might happen if a catastrophic event wiped out the entire Internet and all the books in the world. YOU would be able to reconstruct the world by your inventions, while others would be wailing about not being able to get their iPods to work to find the Encyclopedia Britanica, which used to be touted as being the sole reference needed to reconstruct Western civilization.


TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[thruthefence]

Saw a guy making one on some PBS show once. Had a big mallet, and a post with a spike through it. (and alot of Patience)

 

[MintJulep]

So puzzle yourself these. Could you, having access to no other resources, make:

Iron from iron ore?

Steel?

Concrete?

 

[BrianGar]

First two not a problem, Including making all items needed to carry out task.

Concrete not so much....actually, not at all...I think you need to fire/sinter limestone(we have tons of in the west of Irl) and mix it with either iron ore, or aluminium by- products that would be involved from your first two suggestions?

 

[jmw]

What is on display here is the problem solving ability. That ought to be a given for anyone.
Most people are too used to solving problems by looking for some one else's solution, made easier with the internet (and more dangerous).
There ought not to be anything surprising in finding an original solution to an old problem.
And yet..... innovation usually is based in the available technology and current knowledge.
Babbage designed a difference engine that was ahead of its time, but most successful inventions or developments seem to arise naturally at the right time. We couldn't develop the IC without the preceding technology and so forth, but when all the right components are in place a new idea has its time. Look at how many people were working on electric lights, telephone, television and so on.

But what makes me impressed is the ability to go innovate out of the right time frame.
Babbage designed a difference engine that was ahead of the technology. So how much more difficult is it to innovate a solution to a problem that has to be set in a past technological environment?
Ancient man could nap flints and start a fire with a stick but how many can do so today? Some of these skills come under the heading of "lost knowledge".
That survivalist bloke on the Beeb has been teaching fire lighting skills back to peoples who are just a generation away from being hunter gatherers - and the art of concrete, as developed by the Romans, was lost for centuries. Look at all the unproven conjecture on how the pyramids were built...
So recreating lost methods is an ability to be admired.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[SomptingGuy]

I think the train wheel thing was a discovery explained rather than an invention. The taper on the wheels makes sense if you think of a self-righting mechanism, even though it causes some wild dynamics at high speed.

- Steve

 

[TheBlacksmith]

I figured out a way to make a locking joint between the sides of a drawer and the face on my table saw. I then saw the same joint about a year later in the second or third printing of a wood joinery book. That joint was as old as me.

 

[drawoh]

TheBlacksmith,

As noted in another thread, I have re-invented the French cleat.

I understand that crossbows have been re-invented several times. Several people invented the escapement for movie cameras. Sometimes, there are not many solutions for the problem.

JHG

 

[swertel]

Sometimes, the most simple and elegant solution has already been invented. It just gets updated to the latest technology and branded as a new idea.

A lot of people (being very vague on purpose) in science and engineer have stated that all the great ideas have already been thought of. In other words, back in the days before tv and internet, when people spent time reading and thinking, those people thought of all the solutions to the worlds problems. The problem was, they were considered to be mostly philosophers because the technology didn't exist to make their ideas a reality. It has been stated that the past 50 to 100 years have not come up with any new ideas, but took ideas from our predecessors and made them a reality.

Of course, that doesn't take into account the new ideas that were required to invent the technology to make the old ideas a reality. Then again, those who propose that there are no new ideas twist their logic to include new inventions as part of the old ideas.

Come to think of it, I think those people are all now Hollywood producers making remakes, sequels, and reboots of all the old originals.

--Scott

http://wertel.eng.pro

 

[IRstuff]

"A lot of people (being very vague on purpose) in science and engineer have stated that all the great ideas have already been thought of." Most of them have been proven to be idiots, much like the head of the USPTO that claimed that there were going to be no new patents to be awarded in the 19th century.

So, should Julius Lilienfeld not gotten the patent on the JFET because some Greek philosopher beat him to it? I think not. Of course, not even Lilienfeld could even begin to build a practical JFET, since the silicon IC technology that was needed was not to be developed for nearly 40 yrs.

Ideas are actually quite cheap, it's the reduction to practice that solidifies an idea into an invention. Otherwise, the time machine would have already gotten a patent. Not to mention all the improvements on the prior art that could be dreamed up.

Just consider MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech; now that's a great idea. Yet, nearly 50 years later, it's still to be realized.

I personally see no shame in reinventing something; it's not your fault that you were born 570 years after the original invention, is it? Now, whether you would have invented the same thing 570 years ago, or wound up born as a slave digging ditches is a matter for philosophers to ponder.

Invention and ideas have often been addressed in the framework of "standing on the shoulders of giants." Few ideas/inventions are completely self-contained and without some lineage to existing or previous ideas and inventions.

Altshuller's approach (TRIZ) of codifying the physical principles of all inventions was a new idea that allowed people to essentially run through a checklist of physical principles that could be applied to a solution. While TRIZ is disregarded by most people, they use bits and pieces of TRIZ without realizing it, and without running through all the possibilities in the solution space. One classic principle in TRIZ is decimation in time/space, i.e., either spreading a problem out in time, or spreading it out in space. The latter is the basis for GPUs, which is a relatively new idea for computers, but it's been applied over history, e.g., human "computors" of the last century, down to the creation of the first armies as a means of projecting massive force.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[ScottyUK]

"...the Encyclopedia Britanica, which used to be touted as being the sole reference needed to reconstruct Western civilization."

I've sold my copy - I had no further use for it. My wife knows everything.


----------------------------------

If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!

 

[thruthefence]

"sole reference needed to reconstruct Western civilization"

No, that would be the McMaster-Carr catalog

 

[BrianGar]

Some really great replies, Im feeling better that others sometimes have the same thoughts/feelings, I guess Ill look at it in a good light so, and not be dis-heartened about it.

Looks like Im 'normal' whatever 'normal' is!

BG

 

[GregLocock]

Oh well, as we used to say when doing research "A few weeks in the laboratory can save you a few hours in the library"

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

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[FeX32]

"A few weeks in the laboratory can save you a few hours in the library"

Yes, but different kind of learning no?


Fe

 

[TheBlacksmith]

drawoh - had to look at your link; I used a french cleat also, didn't know/remember it was called that. Probably another old idea I reinvented (thus staying on topic), the cabinet I mounted with the french cleat has doors made of 1/4 inch pegboard, so I can double the use of the wall space; a 3 3/4 inch (nominal 1 x 4) deep cabinet for cans, bottles, etc and 16 square feet of pegboard for hanging tools.

 

[IRstuff]

There are also metal French cleats, which are used to hang our whiteboards at work. Seems like that might be a more compact solution than suggested by the link. The metal cleats protrude less than 1/4" from the wall, and its low profile would seem to present a lower torque on the anchor screws.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize